Aw, come on, Tombat! You referenced the 1960s Batman in yesterday’s strip, at least bring it home in today’s strip with a cartoony blam.

I joke around about this but it’s really all rather sobering. Darin is either dead or has suffered a life-altering wound. Pete could be charged with his murder as an accomplice if Darin *is* dead, and that’s assuming Captain Boomstick doesn’t plan on unloading on Pete next.

This means Jessica is now likely either a widower who will now have to raise her child on her own or her hubby is now in prison for piracy. Pete, well, does it matter? Their careers are over. It’s done. All for some pens he couldn’t wait 8 hours for.

33 responses to “Holy Corpses Batman”

When I first saw this strip, I said to myself “Please be dead please be dead please be dead”. But there’s no way he’s dead. Nothing happens in this strip anymore. I would bet money that tomorrow Pete will wake up in front of his laptop and Darin will be screaming “My pens came!”.
And did Darin get shot while halfway over the edge of the deck and then somehow flip over the railing, toward the gun?

If this was the end of Darrin and Pete, I would personally lobby the Pulitzer committee to award this strip.

Alas, I suspect the history of Funky Winkerbean will make such an effort fruitless tomorrow. Because if we’ve learned anything from Funky Winkerbean, it’s that whatever you may hope, you will always find the biggest disappointment.

Looks like Les has a new book idea! “Darin’s Story…The Other (zzzzzz)”. No way this is real, BanTom eliminated tragedy from FW years ago. I could see this happening in 1999 or something but now? Has to be a dream/fantasy sequence or something. Still though, I definitely enjoyed seeing Boy Lisa die. Maybe Batiuk could ape “South Park” and Darin could be the new Kenny.

TB is most assuredly going to cop out on this, it is far too interesting a way for anyone in this strip to die.

It’s too bad, too, because if Durwood is dead it would provide a pretty sensible and satisfying ending to this idiotic story. Do something as stupid as try to rob a foreign container ship with nothing but a black toque and your friend the comic writer, get shot and die.

Whether this arc ends up being a dream or not, it once again reveals the way characters and plot are manipulated rather than developed in the Funkyverse. Up to this point this arc has depended on unreal situations – Darin’s obsession with a particular brand of pen to be able to work would not be tolerated and he would either be fired or his friends would intervene to get him professional help if necessary. Mason would not blithely lend out his sailboat without first determining whether Pete and Darin possessed the requisite skills to sail it. Pete and Darin’s antics took on a cartoon quality that furthered the unreality being depicted. Now for whatever reason Batty has decided to abruptly flip the whole scenario to the dark side. It’s this inconsistent conceptional vision that makes this strip frustrating as story but a fascinating puzzle vis á vis the author’s thought process.

The problem is that if Darin does die, we’ll be expected to be sorry for a grotesque brat who put art supplies first and his wife and son a distant second. It’s all about the trivial needs of stupid white men, after all. It’s like watching them try to make up for what happened to Crankshaft sixty years later. No one actually knows IF the scouts would have signed Ed if he’d shown up that day so wailing about it as a means of explaining why he’s a whizzled-up old coot is just stupid.

“Now for whatever reason Batty has decided to abruptly flip the whole scenario to the dark side.”

Maybe he’ll cover all the lawsuits that Mason is going to have to deal with when all this is over, as well as finding out his insurance was null and void because he let untrained people use his sailboat to commit a crime.

This is Batiuks sorrowful cartooning legacy….when people cheer when prime characters die off or. Have udder life failures. He has failed to create characters of enduring favorbility. Walt Kelly and Al Capp you ain’t….heck Lynn Johnson beat you out on character development…..fans like Blondie and Nancy more.

After the incident several years ago where Wally was vaporized by an IED in Iraq only to find out the next day that he was playing a video game (why would a PTSD-ridden soldier play a video game that simulates they very environment that you’re living in?), I’m not putting anything past him. Clearly, this will not be the way that Durwood meets his end in the strip. The most plausible explanation is that this has all been Durwood’s dream and he’ll wake up screaming on Monday morning (after the Batman comic book cover homage on Sunday with Pete Renner holding a lifeless Durwood in his arms), and there will be a UPS package from Japan on his doorstep.

Here’s my guess. This was a warning shot and Darin crapped his pants and fainted.

That would’ve been my guess, but then I thought that even if Darin just shits his pants and faints, he’s still a criminal, so it’s not happily ever after, no harm no foul. But then I realized that Batiuk’s enough of a dope that he might not realize how serious a crime he’s having Mopey and Darin committing here, so he might actually think it would be resolved in that fashion. So I don’t know.

Since I can’t resolve that conundrum, I’m going to guess that he’ll have Darin come out of his unconsciousness to discover that he fell asleep on the job and this was his dream. And Mason has a new delivery of pens for him because he’s just that swell a guy!

For anyone who forgot, it’s about this time last year that Batiuk had that stupid “time pool” storyline which ended in a dream copout. Apparently this is an annual tradition for Batiuk now.

In 2013, if you remember, Les fell asleep on the job and had the dream that led to the inexplicable “kill fee” resolution to Lisa’s Story/Lust For Lisa. Was there one for 2014?

@Charles:
Add “unfunny” and “awkward” to inexplicable. First it was Les having a sex fantasy about the actress playing his dead wife cheating on Mason with him. Then it was Les imagining having the opportunity to tell his not-yet-dead wife what would happen to her, but not, because women are delicate flowers who can’t handle things like the truth.